Something Unexpected: Scott’s Radio

As the author of the O’Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio. You’d think that I’d want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free. You’d think that but you’d be wrong. I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence. And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products.

So… Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s):

O’Reilly cut a lot of my text on the Essential Blogging book. (these are all labeled as “Missing”) Why not aggregate that content along with my previous writings on Radio and release it as a free book under the GNU Free Documentation License? This content still gets tons of hits from Google so it’s clearly useful.

A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for “A really cool cover” and within about an hour, she IM’d me the graphic at left. And I’ve been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day. I won’t tell you that this content is perfect – there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done. But there is a lot of content and it’s useful. It’ll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of “Release Early and Release Often”, I give you: